It’s hard to imagine anything worse for America’s still-foundering economy than a hike in tax rates next year — whether for the “rich,” or anyone else.

Yet President Obama and his fellow Democrats seem determined to inflict just that kind of pain on the nation.

And never mind their supposedly promising talks with Republicans in Congress to avoid the fiscal cliff at year’s end.

Obama claims he won a “mandate” for “making sure that the wealthiest Americans pay a little bit more.”

“Higher-income people have to pay their fair share,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi harrumphs.

Folks making $200,000 a year and above, they insist, simply must be zapped.

Alas, it’ll be the entire nation — and not just the “wealthy” — who pay for their punitive populism.

Start with their assertion that current tax rates are unfair.

Actually, they’re right about that: The top 20 percent of earners pays about 70 percent of all federal taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office — with the top 1 percent alone carrying fully 22 percent of the federal tax load.

So, yeah, tax rates are unfair — but to the higher-income groups, not the middle class.

Next, note how Obama pooh-poohs the amount folks will have to pay, should his higher rates become law.

He calls it just “a little bit more.”

Really?

The president wants a 10-year, $1.6 trillion hike. That’s “a little bit more”? Maybe to a big spender like Obama it is, but not to those who’ll be digging deep.

And don’t think Obama’s 11 percent hike in the top rate — from 35 percent to 39.6 percent — is the end of it: There’s also a new 0.9 percent Medicare tax under ObamaCare and new provisions to cap deductions that House analysts say will add about two percentage points more.

Plus, there’s the Medicare payroll tax — another 2.3 percent — bringing the top rate to a painful 44.8 percent.

(ObamaCare’s 3.8 percent capital-gains surcharge would boost that to 48.6 percent if treated as ordinary income.)

Watch out, New York: The state’s own top rate, thanks to Gov. Cuomo and state lawmakers, adds another 8.8 percentage points to that bill. And folks in the city pay yet another 3.9 points — placing their tab in the 60 percent ballpark.

Folks will feel that.

More important, it’ll clobber growth.

Socking everyone.

“The economic reactions to a tax increase distribute the economic losses . . .across the board,” says Tax Foundation analyst Stephen Entin. His group predicts GDP will run about 3 percent below baseline projections over the next half-decade or two, thanks to Obama’s tax hikes.

Job losses? Between 1 million and 4 million. Real wages? Down 2 percent-plus.

Nor is it just the Tax Foundation predicting disaster: Ernst & Young found Obama’s taxes would destroy 700,000 jobs.

Even Obama’s own Council of Economic Advisors’ first chairwoman, Christina Romer, and her husband found in 2010 that “tax increases are highly contractionary.”

Such hikes, they wrote, “appear to have a very large, sustained and highly significant negative impact on output.”

America’s got one hope: that Republicans stick to their pledge and not sign on to any upticks in levies. None.

Even so, they’ll have to get Dems to go along — or automatic hikes kick in.